Stained glass window in a (non-working) microwave, via gIasspigeon on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at squatter removal services, Apple finding uses for defective chips, process heat use in California, the brewing Colorado River crisis, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran Iran wants to charge...

I recently updated a MariaDB server to 11.8 LTS, their latest long term support release. Immediately I started seeing issues on Textpattern 4.9.1 sites I sysadmin for people. Creating new articles works, but editing existing articles results in the following error shown across the bottom of the screen: The article was not saved due to an error. Please try again. Logs didn’t immediately indicate anything, so I restored my database backups to a MariaDB 10.11 LTS server and pointed Text...

“‘What do you fear, lady?’ he asked. ‘A cage’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’” ― The Lord of the Rings The West Coast (Te Tai Poutini) is the most sparsely populated region of New Zealand, with a population of only 33.000 people. At the same time, it is the second-biggest region of the South Island. Yet, it can get rather busy, with thousands of tourists taking the H...

We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent , a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent represents the moment that LLM and Datasette finally come together. I'm really excited about it! Datasette Agent provides a conversational interface for asking questions of the data you have stored in Datasette. Add the datasette-agent-charts plugin and it can generate charts of your data as we...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Piri, whose blog can be found at pketh.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hey, I'm Piri. I'm a software designer, engineer, and artis...

In April last year, Kelsey Piper discovered that OpenAI’s o3 model was surprisingly good at figuring out where a photo was taken from. Like human “geoguessr” pros , o3 could sometimes take a nondescript photo of a beach and tell you exactly where it is. Here’s the example Kelsey gave: Several people reproduced this with good results: not a 100% success rate, but clearly far better than you’d do with a random human guess. The lesson here is that m...

Let \(f\) be a function mapping binary strings of length \(m\) to strings of length \(n\) with \(n>m\). Since there are more strings of length \(n\) than \(m\), \(f\) is not onto. Can you find a string not in the range? This is known as the range avoidance problems, or AVOID for short  Let's do an example. Consider \(f\) that outputs an undirected graph on \(n\) nodes and takes as input: \(n\) A set \(S\) of \(k\) vertices \(v_1,\ldots,v_k\) For each \(i\) and \(j\), \(im\). Since there are mor...

I had a picnic this weekend and at it I gave Phil a pen plot that I had been meaning to for a while: I want to explain it here because I think it's cool! This was drawn with a pen plotter, which is a kind of robotic arm that you can place a pen in, and program to draw very precisely. The result is that you can get crisper lines, that were drawn with a pen instead of inkjet (which also means you can get different kinds of inks). As a piece of art, what I like about it is that while its st...

X (formerly Twitter) employed approximately 1,800 people as of early 2026 — a 76% reduction from the 7,500-strong workforce that existed when Elon Musk acquired the company in October 2022 for $44 billion. This article covers X employee statistics for 2026, including current headcount, historical workforce data, salary breakdowns, layoff details, and hiring trends under the xAI umbrella. X Employee Statistics 2026 — Key Highlights X has roughly 1,800 employees in 2026, down from ~7,500...

On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit . Raspberry Pi 6 One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6. Looking back at previous launches: 2012: Raspberry Pi 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years) 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year) 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years) 2023: Raspberry Pi 5 (+4 years) Following that cycle, one would expect a Pi 6 3-4 years after the Pi 5, which would put it in 2026 or 2027. On Thursday...

In my last blog post I introduced Dimster (DIMensional teSTER), a performance benchmarking tool for Apache Kafka with a specific set of philosophies. In this first share group benchmarking post, we’re going to use share groups as they are not intended to be used, but for a good reason. Share groups allow you to move past partitions as the unit of parallelism by allowing multiple consumers to read from the same partition, using message queue semantics. We’ll run those kinds of tests in th...

When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly walked the shores of a Swedish archipelago, scanning the ground for pebbles that moved: marine snails. Her adviser, a taxonomist, had tasked her with describing the species present there by documenting their traits. She noticed that snails with thicker shells stayed on the shore… Source When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly w...

It’s time to get the VMs rolling. As stated in the intro I’m going to use Terraform to provision VMs and to configure Talos Linux . We’ll end up with this simple interface: # Create VMs and configure Talos nodes terraform apply # Destroy and reset all terraform destroy I run these commands manually on my machine. It’s possible to add these to a CI but I like the faster feedback of running them directly. There will also be some extra complexity and bootstrap commands as...

TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles May 21, 2026 The standard answer to managing dotfiles on NixOS is home-manager . I’ve never used it, due to two aesthetic and one practical objection: I avoid dependencies, especially in nix, which rivals Python in the number of approaches to dependency management. home-manager installs packages for the current user only, which makes sense on non-NixOS systems. But on a single-user desktop system, I prefer having just one set of packages. Ha...

WASHINGTON (May 19, 2026 ) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building state-of-the-art autonomy software and aircraft, today announced that the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW R&E) has selected Shield AI to integrate its Hivemind autonomy software onto the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) , a new class of low-cost, one-way attack drones often referred to as kamikaze drones designed to operate in large numbers. The LUCAS program, d...

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a Linux distribution derived from Chimera Linux , and it’s now available for download. The distribution is called Casuarina Linux. It swaps out musl in Chimera for glibc to gain more binary compatibility with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem. GNOME desktop on Casuarina Linux. Most of the heavy lifting was done by q66 in creating Chimera Linux. I used that excellent base to build C...

Every machine connected to the Internet has an address called an IP address. Originally, these addresses were 32-bit integers (IPv4), giving a theoretical maximum of about four billion distinct addresses. We are all familiar with these addresses (e.g., 192.168.0.0 ). There was a big fuss about how we would run out of addresses. It never happened because we don’t actually need every device to have its own unique address. Your home router needs an address, but every device in your home does not...

For one week each Summer, my great grandma rented the same Newport Beach house for all our extended family to gather under one roof. Crying babies, drunk adults, religious disputes, sand everywhere, frequent injuries, potato salad, no parking -- it was pandemonium. Each day we somehow stuffed 80+ people in that 2-bedroom house. I miss those days. That was long ago. Now I only attend ad-hoc (e.g. coffee) and/or obligatory (e.g. weddings) gatherings. I haven't seen my closest friends in years. I...

When I start writing, sometimes I go to the search engine on my website to see if I have written about a topic before. I did this when I was writing background; foreground . I had been thinking about the contrast between backgrounds and foregrounds for a while, so I wondered if I had any posts on the topic. I typed “background and foreground” into my site search engine with hope that the tool would interpret the query as “show posts that include the words ‘background’ and ‘foregroun...

Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without looking at any of the code that the LLM generates. This technique can be used by people without any knowledge of programming. However the resulting software often shows problems with maintainability, correctness, and security - so is best used for disposable software written for a limited audience. The term was coined in February 2025 by An...

In the hours following the news that art-template fell victim to a supply chain attack via NPM, developers and systems administrators scrambled ensure all of their projects were unaffected from a supply chain attack where attackers have controlled the repository since 2025 and are using it to load unauthorized JavaScript from third party domains, including but not limited to Baidu Analytics. This is is due to the affected dependencies being distributed via NPM ...

In 2005, a Dutch startup called Booking.com offered hotels a deal: list your rooms on our platform for a 12% commission, and we will send you customers you would not otherwise reach. Hotels signed up; travelers followed, because the inventory was there, and by the early 2010s, Booking.com was the dominant hotel search platform across Europe and much of Asia. Then the commissions started climbing. By 2019, many hotels were paying 25-30% per booking, plus additional fees for “preferred placeme...

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